The way Katie describes her life is so pleasantly hagiographic. She could get used to it!

"I was always fat, though like a third of this--" she gestures at her body in general "is courtesy of the lifestyle. Teg's the former-twig quasi-abductee."

Substantial snuggle to emphasize how peripheral Teg is to the whole conversation.

"You did a good job, if indeed it was you. She's got a nice body. Damn shame it doesn't produce any heat. Hey wait, hold on, did you wait to have her turned until after she'd fattened up or can vampires gain weight?"

Argh. Months of Teg being a problem for Tazich on account of being ridiculously physically hot while spiritually weak and useless, and now she's going to get between her and her girl, too. Fuck Iomedae to Hell and back a thousand times. And then back to Hell again.

And of course the first thing she thinks of to say is "well, the lack of body heat is actually a plus, this is Osirion". Fuck Teg!!! Fuck Iomedae!!!!

"Teg . . . listen. I'm gonna be honest. She . . . looks fully committed to the mission, but she's multiply unstable. There's the bloodlust, since she was just turned seven months ago, and then there's . . . her likely remaining divided loyalties, partly to Iomedae. Just gonna air that out before we start talking about the fascinating biology behind her giant tits."

"Wonderful, I'm not the only one who noticed. I take it you're doubly pissed at her for being a liability because it's in the way of you two putting the 'heavy' in 'hot and heavy'? Or is it just that the two of you combined would probably break the bed, and those are expensive? If it's the latter, you're gonna have to figure out a solution in any case if you plan for me to stick around."

"I resent the implication that I would lose to mere furniture! Or lack of it."



"A lot of Evil people think there's no one who can't be seduced. They think if you protest that you can't tempt someone to the dark side, it's merely a sign of your own weakness, and not the insufficiency of the starting material. Since starting material could never be insufficient," she gripes.

"Teg is insufficient starting material." She considers outing Teg's old name to set up the obvious joke, and then decides against. Not worth the risk to their bond. "I don't exactly feel about her the way Somayyeh probably does about you, but . . . it's just not gonna end well."

"What's wrong with her? Is she uuuh, not like us, y'know?" Maybe she's not insufficient starting material. Maybe Tazich, sexy as she is, is just the wrong woman for the job.

"We're trying to free Sothis. Or at least central-southeastern Sothis. Central-southeastern Sothis first."

Fuck, how much should she say? The next natural parts of the story really leverage them if Katie escapes and betrays them. And though Tazich is rock-solid confident in Katie's sanity and attraction to the vital things only Urgathoa can offer, and arrogant, she's not so entirely loose-screwed as to disregard basic opsec practice here.

"Beyond that, each of us individually has a bunch of tangentially-connected subgoals we're working toward." There. Frame it as being about unity and power, rather than liability and fractiousness.

And sell out Teg's backstory. They need the leverage on Teg, honestly. If Katie is an informant from Lastwall, well, too bad for Teg. In Tazich's opinion, where the whole "adopted paladin" situation is concerned, it's only postponing the inevitable.

"Teg was an Iomedaean paladin from Lastwall before she got turned in battle" and abandoned by her superiors "and, in her confused prayers after technically turning Evil knocked her out of alignment with Iomedae I guess, she was clericed by Urgathoa for her inordinate latent gluttonous capacity that the transformation had revealed." Fuck every unknown plane for making there be no way to tell that story that doesn't sound sexy! Fuck the heavens and the depths!

"At least," she says with heavy intonation, "that's the ostensible story."

"Wow, yeah, I would be suspicious that something was up, that sounds too hot to be true. Then again, so do you." Tummypoke.

She does not visibly drool.

"Anyway," she ostensibly fought the vampires who found her and tried to entreat her, seeing that she was god-touched, and only gave in when they offered her giant monsters to eat, sparing the lives of would-have-been victims "even though this is emphatically against Iomedaean edict and thus weakness even by her own culture's standards, she did not kill herself, out of hope that she could return home and--well, I would say 'be with someone she loved', but she doesn't put it that way. She does understand that it's a 'personal loyalty', a 'selfish attachment', and that by 'her own' standards it's a vice.


She still wants to go home someday. She says she hopes working with us will bring her closer."

"Fascinating. You wanna know something about me, Tazich? I'm unable to give up. I don't even mean that as a brag. If I want something badly enough, even if I know for a fact it's impossible, I'll just keep trying at it because giving up is like killing yourself by holding your breath. My brain just won't let me do it. If I were you, I wouldn't be able to give on Teg even if I had confirmed via truth spell and Detect Thoughts that she was straight. Maybe here, with you, this tendency of mine will be an asset."

"--Do you have life goals? Like, that are not about seduction?"

"I do now!"

. . . ?

"Er, or self-improvement."

"I don't know, establishing my own kingdom and making it a haven for dykes who want to escape patriarchy? Is that too Good? We can feed shoplifters to ghouls too if that pleases Urgathoa."

"--That suits." God, she's so perfect. "Well, so long as there's not an artificial quota on shoplifters, such as some meddlesome god might find it necessary to enforce by indirect methods. Such as it is." Actually, why should there be any shoplifters, after they end world hunger? Does Urgathoa even dislike shoplifters? She's Neutral Evil. So is Norgorber. They're shoplifters. "Or they might have to be like, I don't know, a principled advocate for ooze swarm welfare, or something."

"But you see how—if you want to successfully do that, successfully create dyke heaven—

I mean as Ran said earlier, it is a little-known Neutral Evil saying that you can maximize two functions at once.

But you see how, as an imperfect mortal being, you might find yourself unable to not-give-up on seducing Teg, while also not giving up on creating dyke heaven."

"To be honest, I think in a situation like that, my inability to give up would just result in me losing both. Anyways, what I'm getting at is, she's too beautiful to let go to waste. Maybe I can take a crack at her."

She squishes Katie into her.

"You're mine though." It sounds almost offhand.

She rests her head against Tazich's juicy tit. "Sure, but you're Urgathoa's. Would she approve of you denying me the cardinal pleasure of being crushed between the two of your vast, fleshy forms?" 

???

She reflexively offers the raw wolf and realizes she's doing it because she's afraid Katie might be possessed by a daemon and wants to stop pretending as quickly as possible. Realizing Katie might be put off by this, she conceals the motion by turning to put some honey on it instead.

"Fuck if I know," she says. Probably best not to lie about the wishes of your patron deity. She'd offer to pray about it later, but she doesn't want to know.

"Gods. They told me Evil would be seductive. They told me it'd offer sex, and power, and probably tasty food too. But they never mentioned post-coital cuddles. That is, to me, my sign that maybe I've been lied to my whole life. Everyone should be on the lookout for those, y'know. The people in Cheliax are. You could be too. Whenever I get myself off, I feel this sense of dissatisfaction. Guilt, even. Like I'm wasting something precious and beautiful because I have no better option. For the first time in my life, I don't feel that. Evil isn't supposed to feel that way. If it does, then what else were they lying about?"

"I don't know what specific lies you were told." She grins. "If you hadn't already proven yourself free of it, I'd disabuse you of the notion that this" she gestures down at herself "is meaningfully 'a kind of cancer'.

But that's not really about Evil.

Honestly, I don't think those things are particularly Evil's. I think Good just dislikes them the way Evil dislikes--principled advocates for ooze swarm welfare."

"A kind of cancer? Do you mean, like, undeath, or fatness, or tieflings, or what? Hey, what kind of tiefling are you, anyway?"

"The fat. Undeath might qualify. As cancer.

Dad said oni-spawn, and it seems correct enough, though I don't actually know."

"Holy shit, who said that to you? That's meaner than I've ever heard anyone be about it."